A Place to Be Quietly Subversive, A Conversation with Terry Tempest Williams

The article was published in Museum, May/June issue 2008.

Terry Tempest Williams is devoted: to faith, to the earth—and to museums. And it was her faith and passion for the earth that led her to museums, where she spent the bulk of her career. As an educator at the Utah Museum of Natural History (UMNH), she brought diverse, often unorthodox viewpoints into the institution through programming, believing that the community should have opportunities to widen its horizons through new ideas.

Williams carried that passion and fortitude into her writing, never truly leaving museums behind. She spent seven years studying Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, which hangs in Madrid’s Prado Museum. She used the painting to weave a story of her own faith and the natural world in Leap, published in 2000.

Through her writing, Williams advocates passionately for freedom of speech and the environment. She is the author of Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place, An Unspoken Hunger: Stories from the Field, Desert Quartet, Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert, The Open Space of Democracy and Mosaic: Finding Beauty in a Broken World, due out later this year. Williams received the Robert Marshall Award from the Wilderness Society, the Distinguished Achievement Award from the Western American Literature Association and the Wallace Stegner Award given by the Center for the American West. She is currently the Annie Clark Tanner Scholar in Environmental Humanities at the University of Utah. Her writing has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Orion Magazine and numerous anthologies worldwide.

Williams delivered a keynote address at the AAM Annual Meeting in Denver on April 28. She recently spoke with Museum Editor in Chief Susan Breitkopf about how to create a reverence for life, fix political ills and get called into the director’s office.

MUSEUM: YOU’VE SAID THAT MUSEUMS ARE AN IMPORTANT PART OF YOUR LIFE. WHY IS THAT, AND WHAT DO THEY MEAN TO YOU?
Terry Tempest Williams: I’ve worked in museums most of my life in some facet: an internship at the American Museum of Natural History in 1983, 15 years as curator of education and naturalist-in-residence at UMNH from 1983 to 1996 or spending seven years in the Prado Museum in Madrid watching a painting, Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights. Museums are memory palaces. They remind us of what we’re connected to, what it means to be human, and from a political standpoint I think museums are wonderful places to be quietly subversive on behalf of social change.

IN MUCH OF YOUR WRITING, YOU TALK ABOUT THE NOTION OF PLACE. WHAT ROLE DO MUSEUMS PLAY IN CREATING A SENSE OF PLACE?
Our own museum—and I will always think of UMNH in Salt Lake City as my home museum—had an instrumental role in creating not only a sense of place but an ethic of place along the Wasatch Front, in the Intermountain West, as part of the Rocky Mountains, Great Basin and Colorado Plateau where these physiographic regions meet. Early on we had a 12-part lecture series on the Great Basin focusing on everything from geology to ancient Lake Bonneville to the perspective of native peoples to botany, ornithology and fish—the whole gamut. We thought maybe 20 people would show up. Hundreds of people came. What that said to us is that people are hungry for some sort of ecological, biological literacy in order to know where they live and who they live among. And that expanded to another lecture series on the Colorado Plateau and another on the Northern Rockies. I think museums have a vital and vibrant role in community building and environmental awareness if they choose to take it.

I look at the role of smaller museums, like Edge of the Cedars in Blanding, Utah. It’s engaged in an extraordinary program. The museum just received a grant from the National Science Foundation to merge traditional ways of knowledge of the Dine (Navajo) people with contemporary science. This is one example in an anthology of thousands of how museums can integrate and illuminate local populations with their own cultural significance and a larger vision for the planet. I find that extremely exciting and hopeful.

INTEGRATING AND ILLUMINATING REALLY COME BACK TO EDUCATING, RIGHT? IS EDUCATION THE MAIN ROLE THAT MUSEUMS CAN HAVE IN ANY KIND OF SOCIAL ACTION?
Education and exposure, but that depends on the vision of the director and those in the education department. I know in some communities museums have to be very careful. There’s always the concern about donors. More than once, I was called into the director’s office because he felt programming was perhaps inappropriate or too political. But I think that has to be worked out between the staff, depending on what the community’s needs are and the institution’s mission. No one wants to hear a polemic, but I also think we have to push the boundaries. Of course, education is the vehicle for understanding and a shift in perceptions.

The Monterey Bay Aquarium has a chart that fits in your wallet about what foods are ecologically responsible to eat and what aren’t. That’s a radical position for a museum to take, but it’s also the role of an educated museum. People could say that the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is a political museum. The National Museum of the American Indian on the Mall has a very political point of view—and I think it’s a powerful one—but it doesn’t make everyone comfortable.

The role of museums is to educate, to stimulate, to evoke and make us think in a world where too often we have fallen asleep. Museums, whether they’re art museums, historical museums or natural history museums—their job is to wake us up, to remind us how we are connected to the past and the responsibility we have to the future, and they do it through objects, lecture series and discussions. And that’s why I love them so much—call them Houses of Wonder, Parlors of Beauty or Salons of Evocation and Dissent.

NOW YOU’VE PIQUED MY CURIOSITY. WHAT DID YOU DO THAT UPSET YOUR DIRECTOR?
How long do we have? I had a great director, Don Hague, but I do recall a time when we invited [musician and composer] Paul Winter to come. He had done such wonderful work on his soprano saxophone communicating with whales and wolves. We brought him into UMNH and thought, what might dinosaurs sound like? There was this wonderful parade of musicians evoking the spirit of tyrannosaurus rex and the brontosaurus. I can only imagine what it sounded like downstairs. I was called into our director’s office, and he said, “Terry, do you smell marijuana?”

Doug Peacock, author of Grizzly Years: In Search of the American Wilderness, also came and spoke. This was during the Reagan era, and I’ll never forget. I was sitting next to some of the board members of our museum and our director, and the first thing Doug did was get up and say, “My dream in life is to one day take Secretary of Interior James Watt into grizzly country, but first I would stuff a tuna fish sandwich down his pants.” May I tell you there were audible gasps, but by the time he was finished, 2,000 people were on their feet in a standing ovation. He touched everyone’s hearts with his passion for grizzly bears.

Museums—when they’re done well and when we push the boundaries—can bring us into our own sense of humanity and create a reverence for life.

AND SO IT’S WORTH PUSHING THE BOUNDARIES AND GETTING SOME PEOPLE ANGRY IN ORDER TO FURTHER THE MISSION OF THE MUSEUM?
I’m not an advocate for getting people angry, but I am an advocate for creating situations that allow people to perhaps widen their horizons and think about the world differently. That’s the role of museums, and we can do that in various ways.

I think of the exhibit we had on Tongan quilts. This is in Mormon country where quilting is sacred, and you use natural colors and natural fabrics. Well, these Tongan quilts were absolutely magnificent with their vibrant colors and every kind of fabric you can imagine. It brought a whole new connectivity between Mormon, Tongan and Polynesian quilters. So how do we make these linkages? How do we make these unexpected connections? In so doing, we create a community that perhaps wasn’t there before.

I’m not one for playing it safe; it is a balance. But I think if we can articulate what we are trying to do with both integrity and at times, a sense of humor, there is no end to the creativity we can employ. Again, museums are templates of our collective imagination that tie us to the past and the future and remind us what it means to be active participants in the world around us.

Whenever I go to a community, the first place I go is to the museums, not necessarily the large ones. In Southern Utah there’s a Museum of Happiness created by a woman who was a pioneer and a quilter. You literally see her philosophy born out of cloth as to how one pieces together the stories of their life into a beautiful whole.

I look at the objects in the Edge of the Cedars Museum, how they invite us to think about how desert cultures lived in arid country. There is an extraordinary sash made of red and blue macaw feathers that were traded by who knows what Pueblan people 1,000 years ago. There’s another necklace made out of blue metallic beetle carapaces. I think of an object at UMNH, a bracelet made of prairie falcon talons, and I begin to believe that there is a performance of an artifact. These objects are not dead or stationary, they are alive, still speaking from a storied past.

I just love the whole collection mentality of a museum. That mentality repels some people, but the collections of a museum are our legacy as human beings, our history, our heritage—what it means to be human in a dynamic and changing world.

WHY IS IT IMPORTANT TO REMEMBER WHERE WE CAME FROM AND WHAT WE ARE MADE OF?
We are so disconnected right now—fragmented, distracted. We tend to focus on individuals rather than on how we interact and influence one another across borders and boundaries. Museums are places of context and connections. We recognize the patterns and forms of both nature and culture and how they intersect with each other. We remember that nothing exists in isolation. That creativity emerges out of community and we see the world whole, even holy, once again. I love that in a museum you’re given an interdisciplinary mind, an integrated mind. You see how anthropology is connected to geology, which is connected to biology. An ecological model emerges, adaptation through change.

HOW DO YOU RECONCILE THESE ASPIRATIONS WITH THE FINANCIAL STRUGGLES MUSEUMS ARE HAVING?
Museums are under pressure, tremendous financial pressure. And so in the midst of a natural history museum, you see an exhibit on Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s wardrobe, which was the case in the Field Museum in Chicago. Personally, I thought this was quite wonderful. A very innovative curator had added plumages of birds feathers that matched the designs and colors of various inaugural ball gowns.

When the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History was having an exhibit of the photographer Subhankar Banerjee in 2003, Sen. Barbara Boxer held up his photographs of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and said, “This is why we should not be drilling in the Arctic.” Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska, chairman of the very powerful Senate appropriations committee, who had sponsored an amendment that would allow drilling in the refuge, was said to have put pressure on the museum. Three weeks later, Banerjee’s exhibit, slated to be shown beneath the museum’s rotunda, was relegated to the basement. There were many writers—Peter Matheson, Jimmy Carter, myself—who had written essays for the exhibition catalogue, had our words in the captions censored; all the scientific and lyrical interpretation was removed. A caption that spoke about how the Arctic is home to the longest mammal migration in North America now simply read, “Caribou crossing ice.” That’s how susceptible museums are to politics. Sen. Richard Durbin held hearings in the Senate to see if Sen. Stevens had overstepped his position, exerting inappropriate influence.

AND WHAT WAS THE RESULT?
The result was that people actually heard about Subhankar Banerjee’s photographs and were able to see them because of the controversy. The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge was on people’s minds. This censorship of image and word by Republicans pushing for drilling became part of the story, a big story that appeared in the New York Times, Time and Newsweek, even an exposé in Vanity Fair. Banerjee’s photographs have traveled and appeared in museums all across the country. His book, The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: Seasons of Life and Land became a national bestseller.

YOU IMPLIED EARLIER THAT A MUSEUM IS WHERE YOU CAN OBSERVE SOMEONE ELSE’S IMAGINATION AT WORK. CAN YOU EXPAND ON THAT?
If you were to walk in the lobby of UMNH right now, there’s a wonderful artifact of a tyrannosaurus rex’s femur that was broken. When you look inside, you see that dinosaurs had hollow bones just like birds. And then the most amazing thing is that through the petrification of this bone, it is now covered with crystals. So, you know, it’s both a geological exhibit and an exhibit of paleontology and natural history, all at once.

AND EVEN ART TO SOME EXTENT.
Absolutely. I think museums cross boundaries that no other institution in our culture does, because they’re aesthetic, they’re scientific, they’re philosophical. Again, they make these connections for us, inspiring us to see the wonder of the world we live in and what it means to be human. They dare to ask tough, evocative questions, plus they’re fun.

You go into any museum where there are children, and the children are on fire. Their enthusiasm is audible. I think a lot of museums are now offering slumber parties. Can you imagine how wonderful it would be to sleep beneath the giant blue whale in the American Museum of Natural History? When I worked at the American Museum of Natural History, I don’t know how many fundraisers there were with women in their ball gowns dancing between the elephants. Museums are being used by the community for a lot of different purposes. Again, it’s all about the imagination and building new audiences.

SWITCHING GEARS A LITTLE BIT: GIVEN YOUR OPINION THAT MUSEUMS HAVE A CIVIC ROLE TO PLAY IN A DEMOCRACY, WHAT’S YOUR TAKE ON THE CURRENT STATE OF AFFAIRS IN THE U.S.?
We are a nation at war. We seem to keep forgetting this terrible fact. Over 4,000 American troops are dead. Depending on what figures you read, anywhere from 40,000 to 100,000 wounded troops. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilian deaths with two million refugees with no place to call home, and that’s not even looking at Afghanistan. The cost: $2.4 trillion is a conservative estimate.

But perhaps the greatest damage that this administration has done is undermining the state of democracy in this country. [Political theorist] Hannah Arendt said that a totalitarian society exists when the people feel they have no voice. And I think there are many people in this country that feel they have no voice. And if they do, they’re afraid to use it.

This gets back to the power of museums. Museums can be advocates for the open space of democracy and articulate through language, exhibits and lectures why a healthy, vibrant ecosystem matters or why provocative art does have a role in a free society. What was the first thing that happened in Iraq when it was so-called liberated? The museums were pillaged. They were looted. Cultural artifacts destroyed. I don’t think that was an accident.

Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld simply said, “Things happen.” Well, I think things happen when we don’t value a particular culture’s history, if we purposely censor or seek to destroy a civilization. Museums are the caretakers of civilization, both past and present. Freedom of speech is the cornerstone of democracy. Museums must be allowed to operate with an autonomy associated with a democratic society. Whether it is issues of evolution or a piece of art—freedom of speech, separation of church and state alongside science and creative expression become the ethical pillars by which a museum stands. Museums are places of conversation where an engaged and dynamic dialogue can continue. This takes courage for both the communities that house the museums and the professionals who work inside museums to keep the integrity of dialogue going, regardless of the atmosphere of fear that surrounds them.

AND WHAT DO YOU THINK THE NEXT ADMINISTRATION NEEDS TO DO TO UNDO THIS DAMAGE?
I don’t think we can put so much responsibility on one person, whether it’s Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama or John McCain. I think the onus has to come back to the American people, to all of us within our own towns, within our own communities. How are we going to keep the open space of democracy open, and what responsibilities do we have, whether it’s voting, whether it’s demanding that we stop this war in Iraq and Afghanistan. My prayer is that the next president of the United States has the capacity to listen, really listen to what the people in this country are saying, really listen to what people around the world are saying, and be able to inspire us to bring our highest and deepest selves to serve the needs of our own communities, to our own hometown, so that we become responsible for what democracy demands. Democracy is hard work, and it goes back to how many of us have been asleep. So I’m hoping this next president is wide awake, and I’m hoping that we don’t underestimate the power of inspiration to mobilize us to do what we have forgotten we can do both individually and together.

YOUR WRITING COVERS A REALLY BROAD TERRITORY OF IDEAS. HOW HAVE YOU SEEN YOUR WRITING MAKE A DIFFERENCE?
As a writer, I don’t think you ever see that. You know your work from the inside out and the struggle that that involved. I do see myself as part of a larger community of writers who are concerned about a sense of place that creates an ethic of place, and there is a deep tradition in American letters of writers who have kept us awake. You look at Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Melville, Thoreau, Emerson, all the way up through Willa Cather and her fecund voice of the prairies and plains and John Steinbeck writing about Monterey, Calif. I love his book To a God Unknown. A writing life is a life engaged.

I think about William Faulkner’s courage as he spoke out against racism in the American South in the 1950s through his essays and lectures. I’m speaking to you from Castle Valley, Utah. You know, Edward Abbey’s voice is still alive, a cry for the wilderness, long after his passing. Desert Solitaire remains a classic and clarion call for action on the Colorado Plateau.

Rachel Carson remains a visionary, with Silent Spring as relevant now as it was in 1962. We’re just beginning to understand what she set out in that book in terms of the interconnectedness of toxins and the breakdown of the environment and human health. So, although I cannot speak personally of how my work may have changed public policy or people’s awarenesses, I can tell you how other writers have affected my own consciousness, and I would hope that I am part of that tradition of American writers.

IT SEEMS THAT YOUR WORK IS AN EXAMPLE OF MAINTAINING THOUGHTFULNESS AND SPIRITUALITY EVEN IN THE FACE OF SOMETHING LIKE CANCER, AS YOU WRITE ABOUT IN REFUGE.
With Refuge, my book about the rise of Great Salt Lake and the death of my mother from ovarian cancer, ultimately because of nuclear testing in the Nevada desert, the question that kept me up at night was, how do we find refuge in change? And I didn’t know where I was going when I started writing that book. I thought I was writing a book about birds, and yet in many ways that book was my own path toward politicization. I made the decision to cross the line at the Nevada Test Site with other women from Utah and be arrested on behalf of “the clan of one-breasted women,” realizing nine women in my family had all had mastectomies and seven were dead. My brother just passed away from lymphoma, again part of the legacy of the nuclear West.

I just finished a book called Mosaic: Finding Beauty in a Broken World that looks at both the metaphor and art form of mosaic: taking fragments, taking that which is broken and creating something whole. And so I began looking at the Byzantine mosaics in Ravenna, Italy. It takes me into the heart of the Colorado Plateau, Bryce Canyon National Park, with one of the last population of Utah prairie dogs, an ecological mosaic that is fragmented and fractured, to ultimately working with Barefoot Artists in the genocide survivor’s village of Rugerero, Rwanda, together building a genocide memorial out of mosaics, literally from the rubble of war.

I keep myself sane with questions: How do we find beauty in a broken world? It’s the questions that keep my own spirit moving, that allow me to continue to have faith in a world often dark, where at times we shake our heads and say, I don’t even recognize this country anymore.

WHAT ABOUT THE NEXT GENERATION? CAN MUSEUMS HARNESS THEIR ENERGY AND USE IT AS A SOURCE OF HOPE?
I’ve been teaching a class called “The Stories That Sustain Us” through the University of Utah’s Environmental Humanities program. I had the students spend an afternoon in the natural history museum. They went on their own time by themselves and wandered. Many of them had never been, and each one of them in their own time fell in love with a particular object. Each student sat with that object for an hour, which doesn’t sound like a long time, but for this generation it is. I cannot tell you what came out of that exercise, the beauty of what they wrote, the way in which the object engaged them and connected them with their own stories. The object found has become the core image of their own natural autobiography that they’re now working on. It thrills me to think that the moon rock that was brought back to the museum in Utah, which I’m sure went to all 50 states in their state museums, is now part of Brandon Hollingshead’s natural autobiography—why he loves science and why it’s led him to this spiritual commitment to help the save the Everglades.

Ultimately, I think museums are places of imagination that remind us of a much larger world. They are the safe harbor of our stories, our creations and our natural histories. They become umbilical cords to the past, present and future and keep things known. Museums can become the conscience of a community.